'F1' races into summer's sweepstakes

 

  Formula One racing -- and just about every other sport -- offers abundant opportunities for brand promotion. Brand names adorn cars, drivers' suits, and racing venues.  F1: The Movie, which immerses in the Formula One world,  may not shatter box office records, but it may be the envy of folks who work placing products in movies.

   Identifiable brands seem natural enough because Formula One racing leans heavily on branding. Evidently, 2024's sponsorships reportedly topped $2 billion. 

   So, yes, among other things, you can keep count of the number of brands you'll notice in F1, a movie starring Brad Pitt and cars that look as if they belong on launch pads in sci-fi movies.

    You'll find plenty of high-tech flourish in F1, but director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun Maverick) isn't offering a crash course on the use of technology in racing. He's engineering a major helping of IMAX-level footage that seems intended to give viewers a feel for what it's like to drive at speeds exceeding 230 miles per hour. 

    Kosinski builds F1 around a script that cashes in on Pitt's increasingly grizzled star power while relying on clichés about an underdog team that seeks to beat the odds. What? You thought I was going to say that the movie proved why most underdogs never have their day?

   So is the movie any good?

   F1 begins well enough with Pitt's Sonny Hayes notching a NASCAR win in Daytona.  Sonny barely has time to celebrate when a Formula One bigwig and former racing pal (Javier Bardem) offers to fly him to London to join his losing APX team. APX badly needs a racing vet.

    Initially reluctant, Sonny agrees. He heads to London where he meets Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a brash young teammate who's more confident than he has any right to be. Old-school Sonny and new-school Joshua compete to determine who'll lead the team. 

   So is the movie any good?

   I'm getting there.

   Once the rivalry is established, Kosinski introduces the APX team, which includes chief technical director Kate (Kerry Condon), presented as the first woman to hold such a post. She's also a potential romantic interest for Sonny.

   The movie then marches through a variety of races including the Hungarian Grand Prix and the Belgian Grand Prix as it builds toward the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the movie's last Formula One Race, which arrives complete with a military flyover and a bit of been-there-done-that racing fatigue.

    So is the movie any good? C'mon tell us already.

    Well, the sharply edited racing sequences have visceral kick, although they start to feel repetitive. A few wrinkles in the subplot -- a move by a rogue APX board member (Tobias Menzies) to oust Javier's character -- add little.

    The screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Kosinski plays it both ways with Condon's character. A staunchly independent woman in a man's world, Kate's still subject to Sonny's charms.

      Pitt brings old-pro savvy to Sonny, a guy who insists he doesn't race for money. Despite injuries and failure to realize his big dream, he keeps pursuing the rare feeling that occurs for him when everything clicks behind the wheel, and, in his words, he's "flying."

      Inside his helmet, Sonny almost looks like an afterthought while driving, a man whose reflexes might not be a match for the sensors lodged in the car's chassis. I half wondered whether racing could reach a point where drivers become obsolete. Cars could be "driven" by control-room techies. But wait ... Isn't that what video games are for?

     Still, I found the technical aspects of modern racing intriguing and the movie's crashes left me gasping.

    But I've dragged this on long enough. Is the movie any good?

     The best I can say is that it's not bad, and it's scaled to entertain in an environment that captures some of the glamor and grit of Formula One racing.  

     Pitt is playing a type -- something like a loner cowboy in a motorized world -- but he does it well, and the rest of the cast hits the right notes, although Idris's character doesn't have much dimension and Bardem drifts in and out of the movie without gaining much of a foothold.

     Both Ford v Ferrari (2019) and Ferrari (2023) were better movies. Why? Each had more compelling  characters, even if the racing footage in those films wasn't as impressive as what F1 offers during its two-and-half hour running time.

     So in the end, the movie stands as a big summer package that tends to falter during its non-racing pit stops. F1 may not plumb any depths, but Kosinski works in unapologetically bold strokes that make it clear that the movie knows what it's after -- large-scale thrills. 

     

   

   

'Top Gun' sequel hits the right marks

  

    Top Gun: Maverick should once and for all prove how easy it is to make a mega-hit. All you need is Tom Cruise, lots of sleek fighter jets, a gifted camera team, and an attractive supporting cast that knows how to trade macho barbs.

   OK, I'm kidding. 

   If Cruise is the last remaining movie star, as some would have it, it could be because he’s whip smart about managing his career. Besides, a movie as slick as Top Gun: Maverick requires more than a little behind-the-scenes talent.

  Since the release of the original in 1986, few viewers have been clamoring for a sequel. But now we have one, and it deserves credit for finding the right gear: The movie brims with exciting aerial action (not CGI), its own ideas about heroism, and plenty of Cruise charisma.  

    Although Cruise isn’t entirely immune from aging, he retains the pluck and dentist’s dream smile that upped the octane of the original — and many other Cruise hits. 

   Taking over for the late Tony Scott, director Joseph Kosinski infuses the movie with a welcome blast of youth. This time, a new generation of actors (Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, and Monica Barbaro among them) portray the best pilots in the world.

    The dramatic key to the new movie involves Maverick’s relationship with a younger pilot, Miles Teller's Bradley (Rooster) Bradshaw.

     In what amounts to a disregard for avian identity, Rooster, we learn, is the son of Goose, a Maverick pal who died in the original movie. Goose's death, referred to in a flashback, left Maverick wrestling with guilt.

   Maverick’s inner struggles aside, no one attends a Top Gun movie in search of psychological revelation. Kosinski and his team ably create the visceral excitement of watching jets in dog fights. Though preposterous, the movie’s major mission cranks up lots of tension.

   The supporting cast includes Ed Harris (briefly) as an admiral who tries to ground Maverick’s career. Jon Hamm portrays the commanding officer of the unit to which Maverick is reassigned after another run-in with Naval authority.

    Maverick has a protector in the Navy, Val Kilmer's Ice, his former rival from the first movie. Now an admiral, Ice makes sure that Maverick, an officer with a taste for improvisation, survives in a rule-bound military society.

   In a near-nostalgic moment, Kilmer and Cruise share a scene in which Ice types his part of the conversation onto a computer screen before forcing himself to speak.

   For most of the movie, Maverick trains younger pilots to trust their instincts so that they can perform seemingly impossible tasks without thinking.

    A bit of romance softens the proceedings -- or, at least, tries to do that. Jennifer Connelly plays an admiral’s daughter and potential love interest for Maverick. She owns a bar where the pilots gather. She also has a teenage daughter (Lyliana Wray). 

   The young cast — particularly Powell's  “Hangman” — blends perfectly into a movie that glorifies roguish individuality over the increasingly machine-like nature of combat. 

     Moreover, the tough-love conflict between Maverick and Rooster creates sparks, recalling the original without feeling as if it's repeating it, a feat the movie in general accomplishes.

         Early on, Harris’s character claims combat soon won’t involve human pilots. In a drone-dominated future, there’s no place for guys such as Maverick, men who insist that the pilot makes the crucial difference, not the plane.

       Guess who turns out to be wrong?

      Top Gun Maverick probably will roar at the box office. Why not? It’s so obviously scaled for the big screen that there's no reason to take it too seriously -- at least not as a portrait of military life or of global conflict.

      To put it another way, in the world of movies, Top Gun: Maverick hits the mark, maybe because neither the filmmakers nor the actors are flying on auto-pilot.

'Oblivion' has an intriguing look

But Tom Cruise's latest doesn't have a plot to match ...
I saw Oblivion at a preview screening at an IMAX theater. I'd have to say that seeing the movie that way made for a heightened viewing experience. Even at that, I can't say that I'd ever had any desire to see a three-story projection of Tom Cruise's face, particularly in a role in which an awful lot of Cruise's acting consists of open-mouthed staring at special effects.

Maybe Cruise shouldn't be blamed. The effects in Oblivion -- directed by Joseph Kosinski of Tron Legacy fame -- offer a lot to tempt wandering eyes. Here's one post-apocalyptic thriller that doesn't look like every other sci-fi movie you've ever seen.

Set on Earth in 2077, Oblivion revolves around a future in which civilization mostly has been destroyed. The planet's population used nuclear weapons to annihilate an invading army of interplanetary thugs, achieving what may be the ultimate in pyrrhic victories. When the movie opens we meet a two-person mop-up crew that has been left to patrol the war-ravaged Earth before they join the rest of the survivors on Titan, a distant moon of Saturn. The team consists of Jack Harper (Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). The duo periodically checks in with a mission controller (Melissa Leo) who speaks with a folksy southern accent.

Jack and Victoria occupy a home above the clouds that has a spare, ultra-modern look, sort of what you might imagine the creators of the Jetsons would have come up with had they taken themselves seriously.

You'll just about have settled into your seat when Kosinski has Cruise flying around Earth in Top Gun-style, only this time his airborne vehicle looks like a cross between a helicopter, a jet and a drone. Not content with one toy for Cruise, the movie quickly provides Jack with another, a motorcycle that detaches from the body of Harper's aircraft.

And speaking of drones ...

It's just here that Oblivion finds a small measure of topical relevance. Jack's job involves servicing flying weapons the movie calls ... well ... drones. Harper's job: Refuel the drones, which are used to wipe out lingering marauders known as Scavengers or, more familiarly, "Scavs."

The movie's early scenes are devoted to action set pieces, including one that takes place in an abandoned library. Another scene takes us to the top of the Empire State Building, which now sits at ground level. Jack's haunted by memories of pre-war New York City, but doesn't know what to make of them. He knows every detail of the last Super Bowl, which he tells us was played in 2017. He wears a Yankee baseball cap, and evidently has given up shaving on a regular basis.

The plot -- which can be confusing -- takes a strange turn when Harper discovers a crashed ship during one of his Earth patrols. The crew has been scattered about in coffin-like containers where they've been "sleeping" for an extended period, presumably because they were supposed to make a lengthy space flight. Harper is able to rescue one member of the crew.

I guess if you had to pick one crew member to save, you could do worse than the beautiful Olga Kurylenko, last seen in Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. Kurylenko's Julia seems to have some sort of connection with Jack.

Jack, of course, must be portrayed as having a few special traits. Perhaps that's why he savors a book that he finds on one of his missions, a copy of Thomas Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. Jack's particularly drawn to line about how to die a noble death.

If you've seen the trailer for Oblivion, you know that a cigar-chomping Morgan Freeman appears in the movie. Best not to explain Freeman's role in the story, but his character eventually helps drive the plot toward its muddled and disappointing destination.

Because the movie's primary pleasures are visual, it's worth mentioning that cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who also did Life of Pi, contributes to the movie's allure -- although Oblivion's considerable visual pleasures become somewhat repetitive as the action unfolds.

So what goes wrong? The troubles seem to have started at the typewriter; i.e., with the screenplay by Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn, who based their work on a graphic novel and original story by Kosinski. The various plot machinations often defy logic, and the movie includes an epilogue that struck me as a cheat.

I also wish that Cruise would find something else to do aside from big-budget extravaganzas that can undermine their intelligence with dumb dialogue (Oblivion has its share) and obligatory action. But that, I'm afraid, takes us out of the realm of science fiction and into the realm of hopeless fantasy.

'TRON: Legacy:' a mixed second helping

28 years after the original, Disney's back with a sequel to Tron. Wish I could say that TRON:Legacy was worth the wait.

TRON: Legacy offers a decidedly mixed inheritance as far as sequels go, demonstrating once again that visual pyrotechnics can’t entirely substitute for an involving story. As if we needed reminding.

I say this as one who had been looking forward to TRON: Legacy, mostly because of undeniable advances in computer-generated imagery, technology that was in its infancy when TRON – regarded as a technical groundbreaker -- first hit the nation’s screens in 1982.

For the first 30 or so minutes, I felt as if my anticipation had been rewarded. Director Joseph Kosinski, who has made a major splash in the advertising world, tops the digital environment of the original, particularly for those who see the movie in IMAX 3-D.

But Legacy’s intricately imagined visual world eventually falls prey to the truth of a cliché: Familiarity breeds a bit of contempt as Kosinski’s color palette – heavy on blacks with orange piping -- succumbs to monotony. The world of TRON, which must have been intended to evoke a bedazzled succession of “wows,” begins to resemble the inside of a giant toaster oven, coils aglow.

The screenplay for TRON: Legacy hosts a mash-up of familiar themes: the search for an absent father, the desire of artificially created creatures to enter the real world and the guilt of a genius creator who hasn’t anticipated all the consequences of his well-intended invention.

A story recap seems almost superfluous in a movie that invests most of its capital in action and visual effects. Suffice it to say that young Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) enters the world of Tron to search for the father (Jeff Bridges) who vanished when Sam was still a boy. Once inside this digital world, Sam faces a series of stern tests as he tries to return to “reality” through a fast-closing portal.

Sam’s attempts to exit from The Grid, as its inhabitants refer to the expansive, artificial world, brings him into conflict with Clu, a digitally created tyrant who looks like a younger version of Bridges’ character. Why not? Bridges’ Kevin Flynn created Clu, who has turned into his evil alter ego.

Sam’s assisted in his struggle by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a digital creation with a pageboy haircut, a sleek punk look and a fashionably pallid complexion. Quorra holds the key to both mankind’s advancement and to fan boy libidos.

At one point, Michael Sheen shows up as a Grid resident with vaudevillian flare and a haircut that makes him look like a cut-rate David Bowie. He carries a cane, and prances about like someone who’s hell bent on providing arch comic relief. But to what purpose?

Like lots of other things in Disney’s somewhat juvenile helping of sci-fi, Sheen’s Zeus seems more adornment than anything else.

Kosinski does some of his best work when re-imagining the Light Cycles that became familiar in the first installment, and he deserves credit for creating a sense of dark spaciousness within the world of The Grid. But as Legacy wears on, its imagery seems to disconnect from the story, turning into more stuff to stare at, either approvingly or with disinterest depending on one's bent.

Those who go along for the Legacy ride probably won’t care that the movie boasts some of the worst dialog of the year, so lame that even Bridges (who’s likely to earn a best-actor nomination for his work in the upcoming True Grit) is forced to deadpan his way through nearly every scene. His character tries to ignite the occasional countercultural spark, but the lingo seems more dated than funny.

I wonder. Is it possible that the whole idea of TRON – penetrating a digital world – is passé? These days, such a premise seems less like sci-fi than a description of the average teen-ager’s life.

TRON: Legacy may appeal to fans of the original, as well as to those for whom visual kicks are sufficient reason to see a movie. I might have been able to join the latter group had Kosinksi done more to mix his visual pitches instead of tending toward repetition.

Like Bridge’s character, I began to feel trapped in a digital world. I don’t know how you’ll feel, but somewhere around the half way mark I started wondering where I might find the nearest exit portal.